Hacker News Reader

Comment by annadane | Hacker News Reader

Something that strikes me about FreeBSD is you need a certain amount of knowledge going in. On Linux, you can set up a desktop pretty easily. Then you can find out more advanced stuff later on. BSD just dumps you into a shell. You have to know to install this or that metapackage to get a graphical display going and the concepts are different enough from Linux land so that it takes you a while to get going and feel comfortable

View on HN

Ah that is not quite accurate. Sure many linux distros will install a desktop environment for you. FreeBSD will require you to install a package for the one of your choice which should also install all dependencies. As noted elsewhere, X pretty much works now with no additional config update unless you have a very unusual setup. That shouldn't be too high a hurdle as even on linux you will need to know how to install packages at some point too.

And if you don't want to do that, you can try something like GhostBSD which is based on FreeBSD with the MATE desktop.

I found the FreeBSD handbook to be extremely helpful in both installing the system and trying to navigate my way around it. It's what made me finally comfortable moving around in *nix systems when I was in a "install every weird operating system that exists" phase.

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/index.html

There are also 'zero configuration' FreeBSD based systems like GhostBSD or NomadBSD. You should try them instead if you want Ubuntu-like experience.

That depends on when one started with UNIX, cough xmodconfig.

>BSD just dumps you into a shell

False. OpenBSD assk you at the install process if you want to launch Xenodm from Xenocara at boot.

You get fvwm, right, but X is totally configured.

Well, as a FreeBSD user earlier this year I tried about 3 distros to install anew [ previously arch ] from a thumbdrive. None would bring up the install screen properly [ I suppose my monitor has the wrong input or something... ] and IIRC one that would would not let me complete partitioning without errors. [ Not to be overly critical of linux, but I ran out of time... ]

Reply on news.ycombinator.com